Exploring the Connections Between Nature and Art of Dance Through Geometrical Transformation and Abstraction - This photographic series is completed for my 3rd Landscape Photography course project at the Lebanese American University, which aimed at showing dance through landscapes. 

This series is inspired by the abstractness of geometry which holds significant spiritual connotations in almost all forms of art, including dance. My aim was to further discover the roots behind such connotations, almost all certain that I would find them in nature.

My research was based on spiritual references from Modern Art movements (mainly Expressionism) and a curated book of the exhibition "The Spiritual in Art: 1890-1985." These references discussed the nature of abstract art as resembling the art of the primitive man, who took inspiration from nature for the most (if not all) part of their artworks. But my research took a second direction when I was introduced to the scientific nature of abstract art and geometry and became inspired by concepts such as space harmony and geometrical transformation.

My new research direction is depicted in the grid of the three images of the series. Although accidental, this grid performs the modern process of improvising a ballet (left to right).

Lines - Photograph No. 1 of the series

Inspired by a series of short videos, titled Improvisation Technologies, by American dancer and choreographer William Forsythe. The series demonstrates going about creating new movements using invisible geometry, and it starts with imagining lines and running the limbs accordingly. Forsythe tried to achieve the goal of modern ballet that focuses on the beginning of the movement rather than on the final position.

Spatial Transformation - Photograph No. 2 of the series

Improvisation Technologies (by American Dancer and Choreographer William Forsythe) build spatial awareness of the dancers who will forget how to move and will instead try to understand and illustrate the relationship between the points on the lines and the points on their bodies. The focus becomes transforming matched lines and geometric shapes in space to perform internal movements in universal patterns of harmony and balance. This body of a mountain is the equivalent of a spatially aware dancer that not only applies space harmony but sets the stage apart to yield itself to the act to assert power – the symbolic nature of dance.

Triangle - Photograph No. 3 of the series

Inspired by the short animation film “Notes on a Triangle” (1966) by the Canadian Animation Director and Producer René Jodoin. The triangle in Jodoin’s short film is shown splitting into some hundred transformations and is the equivalent of the Principal Dancer in a Geometric Ballet, who achieved the highest ranking of a dancer, by mastering the technical ability of performing, as of modern ballet, the spatial transformation of the beginning position to infinite possibilities of other positions. The mountain in the photograph is an ode to this triangle, the same way the triangle in art is an ode to the mountain – it is inspired by the groundedness of the mountain with an admirable clear path from its bottom to its apex. The triangle becomes the universal idea of this mountain and is used as this idea in almost all forms of art – the symbolic nature of dance.